Memoirs

"War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it." Sherman wrote that to the mayor of Atlanta, who had asked him to let the city's families stay, and he prints the whole exchange here rather than paraphrase himself into something kinder. The book is built that way throughout, out of the orders and telegrams he actually signed, and the voice that comes off them wears no varnish: quick, plain, faintly impatient, describing the ruin of a state the way another man might describe a bridge he built.